Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(70)

We can’t. It shouldn’t.

We should be judged for precisely what we are, and nothing more: a city full of villains and victims, and the hopeless men who failed to change it.

? ? ?

I’ve gone back to Storage Room Six, Ruthie. That’s why I’m writing this, to tell you that much—so you’ll understand to go looking there, in the event I do not return from my errand. I’m not sure how much help the storage room will be to you; I’m not sure how much will even be left by the time you find it. It’s as I told the inspector: The place eats things—evidence, relics, time, and memories alike.

Piece by piece, shred by shred, all the evidence with which we ever even tried to serve justice and goodwill is eroded, right out from under us. This is a cliff we stand upon, Ruthie. A cliff that will fail in time, and we’ll all fall into the ocean unless we walk away, leave this place, find bedrock somewhere else.

You should walk away. You’ve done literally all you can, and more than was asked. There’s nothing left for you here. Take your husband and go, make a home in another town. Anywhere else. Leave while you can. Leave before they force you to stay.

? ? ?

I sat in the storage room and I listened hard, closing my eyes and opening my ears, breathing as quietly as I could. When I do this, when I slow down the world, muffle out the distractions, sometimes I can hear little voices when I’m in that weird basement.

No, not voices. That lends the wrong impression. It’s more as if . . . I can feel the currents of some conversation taking place around me, regardless of me. It’s a soft thing, tendrils almost. Think of the softest silk you’ve ever touched, and imagine it stripped down to its very threads. Imagine those threads drawn across your skin by an invisible hand, or imagine (better still) that you sit inside a cauldron full of the things, being stirred by an unseen spoon.

That’s almost what I mean.

And when it’s very quiet, when I sit inside the damp, musty silence of Storage Room Six, I feel those threads. I feel them and I can almost see them, hear them. Believe them, when they move around my ears like whispers.

I only catch stray words, here and there. The occasional phrase. Sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s nonsense—or taken so far out of context that it might as well be. But there’s a rhythm to it all the same. A tidal fluctuation, a coming and going. A beat.

I have sat there, in Storage Room Six, for hours upon hours. I have pored over boxes full of files, wishing for the pieces to assemble themselves in my mind—demanding that the evidence lend me some hint of a killer, or a motive. Anything, really.

I’ve wondered at that motive time and time again. What would make a man (or men, or woman, or women) hunt down fellow citizens on the streets? What would make him (or them, or her) relentlessly murder, all across the cityscape?

And beyond it, too. There’s rumor of a new death, this one outside the usual parameters. This one, they found in a set of runoff tunnels that dump into a creek. Usually these tunnels (and they’re not tunnels, really—they’re concrete chutes, as much as anything) . . . usually they carry detritus from the rail yards—they sluice off all the wet things. All the things that are easier to dump down a drain than to bury or burn.

I don’t think the body was flushed down the drain; I don’t think there’s a drain big enough to hold it. I think the body was carried to the creek’s edge, and jammed up inside that cold concrete casket, and left there to rot. I think that the killer assumed, and correctly, that by the time the corpse was found, there’d be little left to identify it. There’d be nothing present but bones, and strips of fabric, and muddy damp flakes of peeled skin.

I’m not sure if it’s the same man.

Not “Harry the Hacker,” for he never existed. But the same fellow who committed (most of) the other killings. I’m not sure if it’s him—or if it is, then we may have something awful on our hands. More awful than a spree killer with an axe, that is.

(Dear God, would you look at how far my standards for awful have fallen? It’s as if they never existed in the first place.)

But here, this is what I mean: The killer never tried to hide the bodies before, no further than a cursory dragging to haul them out of a main thoroughfare. If this is the same killer, then he’s learning. He’s improving. He intends to continue unabated, and with greater efficiency. If it’s not the same killer, then it’s some other one—hoping to ride the first maniac’s coattails.

Either way, it spells bad things for Birmingham.

All the more reason, Ruth. All the more reason for you to leave, while the leaving is good.

? ? ?

The room tells me little, and it tells me lots. It gives me hints and signs, and it takes everything else away. Pages of evidence fade until they are clean white sheets, or unfilled forms never typed upon, never signed. Envelopes vanish into the air. Paper clips collect at the bottom of boxes, freed from whatever documents they once held in meticulous place. Pencils shorten themselves, reduce to nubs, and are gone altogether without having ever been sharpened. Pens run dry. Photographs lighten and lighten and lighten until they may as well be pictures of sheets strung out on a line.

All the signs are there, and all the portents have evaporated.

Whatever has happened, whatever is coming, it won’t fall in our favor. We have few allies, no legal standing. No knowledge of what we’re even fighting, though it wears a man’s face and speaks with a man’s voice, for all that it’s unreal and untrue.